Irish Examiner view: Education is our best foil to extremism

After last week’s events in Washington, Hillary Clinton, who previously branded Trump supporters as 'deplorables', may feel vindicated.

One of the many reasons Hillary Clinton did not succeed Barack Obama as US president in 2016 was her use of the phrase “basket of deplorables” to describe half of Donald Trump’s supporters. “They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic,” she warned. The next day, she expressed regret for “saying half”.

Her prescience was a hostage to fortune. Clinton conceded, in her 2017 book What Happened, that the phrase was one of the rocks her ambitions crashed on and denied her the White House. The Trump campaign, then guided by Stephen Bannon, goaded Clinton with the phrase. Many Trump supporters adopted the ‘deplorable’ moniker as a gesture of defiance. Those who accused Clinton of arrogance, of elitism, and of being out of touch, were strident, revelling in the opportunity to goad the Ivy League-educated candidate, all the while turning a blind eye to their own champion’s unshakeable, in-the-marrow ignorance.